Computer and network systems such as personal computers, workstations, server systems, and cloud storage systems, typically include data storage elements for storing and retrieving data. These data storage elements can include data storage devices, such as hard disk drives, solid state storage devices, hybrid storage devices, tape storage devices, and other mass storage devices.
To read and write data to rotating media storage drives, such as hard disk drives, read/write heads are employed to magnetically read and write to disk platters. Read/write heads are typically arranged on a movable armature which is positioned across the platter in response to data operations. However, when data operations are spread across the surface of a platter, the armature holding the read/write heads can be forced to make many positional changes to read or write the associated data. This greater movement of the read/write heads in a hard disk drive can lead to increased power consumption of the hard disk drive.
Power is a large concern for data center planning and operations. Improving power efficiency of data centers can allow for increased density in storage layouts and increased data storage performance for the data center. Even if individual hard disk drives in a data center each consume a small amount of power, a few percentage savings in power consumption can be substantial when scaled over an entire data center.